Ground squirrel's nuts about tomatoes

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, July 14, 2007

A swallowtail butterfly perches on 'Gold Mound' lantana as the Central Valley's weather heats up and animals respond. Chronicle photo by Lynette Evans

A swallowtail butterfly perches on 'Gold Mound' lantana as the Central Valley's weather heats up and animals respond. Chronicle photo by Lynette Evans

Ground squirrel's nuts about tomatoes

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They say there's no honor among thieves, and I can believe it. We were driving on Thornton Road (San Joaquin County) on Saturday when John slowed for a gray ground squirrel dashing across the road with a tomato in its mouth. We looked in the direction the squirrel had come from, and saw, not a tomato field, but an untended table laden with baskets of fruit and vegetables -- an "honor system" farm stand.

As the squirrel scurried away, we wondered if the farm stand's owner would think that humans were ripping him off. Or, as John proposed, perhaps the squirrel had left a nut behind.

This was after an encounter earlier with a lone coyote standing a short way into a harvested hayfield -- at about 4:45 in the afternoon -- not doing anything, not eating anything, just looking around, as a farm dog in the same spot might.

Accustomed as we are to nightly coyote serenades -- at a pitch that, awakening us from a sound sleep, leaves us confused as to whether we're at the farm hearing coyotes or in the city hearing sirens (but that sends a chill nevertheless as we wonder if all the farm cats are safely at home) -- this lone coyote seemed improbably benign.

The holiday week was sort of an animal week, even without our thinking about it. On Monday a blue-tipped swallowtail butterfly busied itself with the lantana 'Gold Mound' plants as I prepared a flower bed for planting. Then, Piro, last year's kitten, was a no-show all day on the Fourth and, notwithstanding the 104-degree heat that kept all the pets napping out of sight, by the time we turned in at midnight, we were convinced he wasn't coming home. At 6 a.m., a houseguest found him sleeping in my car in the garage. As Piro munched his breakfast kibbles, we informed him that were he to disappear for good that day, we'd already be done grieving for him.

As the days heated up, the mourning doves and a hummingbird or two were the only birds about in daylight. The barn owls are now a scattered family that converges on the pole and wire above the owl house only in deep dusk, where the juveniles critch-critch, hoping that their parents will fly in with a morsel of food. On Saturday, one knocked the other off the pole, and the pair flew off, buff-colored bellies gliding directly overhead. Clearing the house roof, they collided midair, recovered and flew into the oak tree -- the collision a mating dance or simply awkward siblings scrabbling, we aren't birders enough to know.

We shared the week with birds in other ways as well. Peeling and cutting up bird-pecked peaches for the freezer, I couldn't help thinking it's not going halves with the birds on the fruit that I mind, it's having to share half of every single peach. Hopefully, the farm stand owner who's missing a tomato or two didn't return to find the remaining tomatoes nibbled. That would be a real traducing of the honor system.